Experimental Investigations on Solar Water Heater Performance Enhancement using Nanofluids

The depletion of conventional fuel and increase in global warming due to burning of the conventional fuel forces researchers to concentrate on development of non-conventional energy sources. The solar energy can be converted into solar thermal energy using solar water heater tubes. The energy conversion efficiency of solar radiation into thermal energy can be improved by many methods. In this work, we used nanofluids to increase the thermal energy conversion with aluminum oxide with dosage of 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1%. From this work, we observed that the use of nanofluids increases the solar energy absorption and increases the energy conversion efficiency. It is suggested from this work that the use of nanofluid increases the performance of the solar water heater.